A solidão intelectual | Olavo de Carvalho

I mean, Brazilian journalism today is a minimalist thing, today it wouldn’t be possible for anyone to publish articles like those by al Maria carp, which 7 8 10 pages, that ‘s impossible, that is to say, when you can fit a four-page article in there, it’s already a something like that is already a size that is almost considered almost obscene, right, the normal thing is a report of half two pages and of course in this space it is not possible to demonstrate the discussion of what third is just the exposure, the externalization of one of one of an opinion or the summary of a fact, then it is clear that between the simple newspaper reader and the students on my course, that is to say, the latter T have an extraordinary advantage because they will even understand these articles in a very different way because they know everything that is behind them that is to say, the entire repertoire of analytical thoughts and subsidies that were collected to substantiate that is still the case. I sometimes find myself in a very funny position because normally an educated reader from 30 or 40 years ago said, when I read an article, he I could more or less imagine the form, mind, repertoire, mental horizon of the author and automatically realized what else the author would need to know to be able to say what he said today. Nowadays people don’t do that at all if you write a two-page article, people read it as if it were the entire content of their mind, as if there had been no listening, no examination, no deepening, no meditation, nothing, nothing, nothing, so they strictly discuss what is stated in an article, sometimes they don’t even remember to check that with other articles or with books or with I don’t even imagine that this possibility exists, so in general the discussions that take place about what I say in the press Not just me but everyone says it in the press are V. To say it calls it superficiality would even be a euphemism because at least what is on the surface at least touches, right, the water, the guys don’t even reach the surface, they hover above, right, they don’t get to touch on the subject, so looking from my point of view, it means that I from the guy who knows not only that that he wrote but you know the other things he didn’t write you know the things he said in class In this regard and even the things he hasn’t said yet, that ‘s right, it’s very funny, all of this is to be seen this way, let’s say it This opaque literalism, this thing flat flat reading that people do today is also an absolutely desperate thing and that this phenomenon alone is enough to demonstrate the total bankruptcy of higher education in Brazil, right ? they allow citizens to spend money either on monthly fees or on taxes, right? And you see this immense educational equipment all created in Brazil, which is a place where there are more professors. One of the places that has more university professors per capita compared to the population student, you see that all this does not serve to form a reader, a newspaper reader, right? So, especially comparing public discussions in Brazil and here we notice that even the most stupid and ill-intentioned people at least something of what the other person is saying. they understand, they are able to see a little beyond what, you know, and that is to say, behind the text they perceive some intention, but in Brazil they have two or three stereotypes in their head and at most they associate what they are reading with their own stereotypes right and he does this sometimes with absolute certainty the other day I think I even commented here, a university professor said this It’s a shame that Olavo doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t disclose What are the sources of his ideas as Jose demestre Donoso CZ right And if there was another one, you know, from bonal, I would take some authors from the 10th century who are, let’s say, compared to what I’m used to reading, they are of the fifth category, that is to say, they wouldn’t be polemicists at most, right, so you’re truly believing that those were the sources. of my ideas, I mean, I don’t even have a very remote idea, right, of sources of influences, the person can do it nowadays, right, normally, a cultured author should, at first glance, he’s reading an author, so he already knows more or less what the currents that influenced him from afar, right But people don’t even get that right because it should be an almost instinctive thing where you have a circle of more or less qualified readers, this perception should already be almost instinctive, right Sometimes even due to style details you Do you understand ? Hey, let’s say what is it? If you know the history of styles, you can associate one thing with another, right? Very well, but then I wrote an article this week that touches on exactly the subject of this question. I’m going to put this little thing here in the Diário do Comércio and I’m going to develop this in class, right, and just then the question comes to me here from Rafael Rezende this summer, which is how I was thinking about using the occasion of my birthday, March 18th, to get together my relatives, my wife’s relatives, almost all of them friends, have abandoned me to explain to them the little I know about what is happening in Brazil and the world and that is hidden by the media, what is about to happen, what have I done to understand better and combat etc etc and what they can do Against this it was then that I arrived at class 11 and this Among the various subjects talks about the acceptance of the serious Student in this anti-intellectual Brazil even so I already suspected that the majority would think that I am It would be crazy if I exposed those subjects in the fam, word spreads that I have crazy ideas, unfortunately we are very close, it is clear that there is a love for them and I don’t want them to be the willfully ignorant people that you mentioned, I also want to show that intellectual life does not It’s just a bureaucratic symbol, so I would like at least among those closest to me that those who didn’t help wouldn’t get in the way and that the veiled contempt would become explicit. Is this still an emotional need on my part? Well, the answer is of course a need. affective No one can live alone, that’s right, but I wanted to take advantage of this question and also the article I wrote that I’ll read to you later because I don’t think it will be published next week in the Diário do Comércio because editors of opinion page I myself was one of them I know that they are the terror Panic of the editor of the opinion section arrives one day and there is no article to publish and he has to write all the articles so what do they do they try to accumulate there are a lot of things in the drawer The result is that the author never knows the exact day that it will come out so I don’t know if this article will come out next week so but the article is exactly about that let’s say this this this background that he called anti-intellectual but which is actually more than that, it is a much more serious problem than what I myself have emphasized here and as I already said in a class, this is not something that only exists in the surrounding society but it exists Within each one of us, this means that your intellectual development potential is inhibited, you know, by the fear you have of being rejected and this is no longer a problem that is outside, it is in society, it is already internalized within you and this weakens barbarously, right? Can you imagine what the lives of so many writers, poets, philosophers, etc. etc. would have been like if they had all gone through this in their respective environments, right? So ISO means that a good portion of the energy they could have devoted to the activity creative or studies, personal development would have to be spent only on this activity, let’s say internal and external self-defense against hostility, that is, against hostility from the environment, which, being internalized, is experienced within you as inhibition, that is, how do you expect that there is a negative reaction How do you expect people to reject you, you immediately create a rejection complex? So how are you going to do it then to be accepted, to pass as a normal person in front of a circle of people who cannot treat you? understand in any way Look, I say this not only because of my personal experience but because I studied the subject, I mean, I did a systematic study of how this theme, which is constant in Brazilian society, appeared in Brazilian literature, okay, and you are will see that this reappears there, for example in Machado de Assis and Lima Barreto in the book of origins lesta that I already mentioned here the beans and the dream in the Graciliano Ramos in the book ca thesis then in the book anguish the character of anguish luí da Silva does not He is nothing other than an intellectual driven mad by this complex of rejection of his environment, he is a Luís da Silva is a complex soul and at the same time he is one of some talent, he has a certain depth that is intellectual that is not common in his environment and he then feels rejected Oppressed and he is a renegade rejected by the environment Petty bourgeois and bourgeois Okay, that problem of his is gradually transforming into a major problem that he has between him and another comrade who is quite a bourgeois successful in life and they are both competing for the same woman and that problem grows inside Luiz da Silva’s soul until he kills his current one, not out of jealousy, right, that’s the interesting thing about you reading anguish. being a crime, a crime of passion created by jealousy, but if you examine it properly you will see that this is not the problem, say what exactly is the problem at stake, okay, that’s right, good for this, and to investigate this, and pay attention, again, this is not a problem. of Brazilian society, a problem of the Brazilian Soul in each one of us, if it weren’t in each one of us, it couldn’t become the subject of a psychological novel like anguish. Okay, and remember that it’s great Ramos suffered from this problem personally, he knew what he was talking and he was so close to the theme, let’s say he can’t develop the novel satisfactorily as he had developed the theme of Saint Bernard in Saint Bernard. one who only thought about money, money and power and who got ahead in life by oppressing everyone and then he meets a little teacher and falls in love with the little teacher and marries the little teacher but the little teacher she is the intellectual she is the person who has sensitivity, she sees, she has a more serious view of life etc etc and that farmer who can’t be said to not love her he loves her but can’t understand so he torments her so much and limits her so much that she ends up committing suicide so say the topic even though they seem so different these two gro novels are the theme is the same in essence only seen from one side and seen from the other that is to say the central character of the book São Bernardo who is the farmer He is the one who writes the story he is writing his own his own autobiography, right, it’s something that has gone unnoticed by some of the more base critics , such as Antônio Canto, who I consider to be a terrible critic , I think Antnio C doesn’t know. an entirely gross materialist guy and what an ego he is the one who is writing the memoirs and that character writes as well as Graciliano Ramos writes, so to speak, in the Graciliano Ramos style, one cannot say it would be stupid to say that Graciliano in this book imitated the style of speech of a farmer, no, he uses another element of Popular speech, which would be that of the farmer, but putting together the sentences, putting together his own narrative. Like Graciliano himself, he would put together, which shows that in the book, when he writes the book, he, his wife, has already killed herself, right? the tragedy is complete, right? The thing is not happening at the time it is being narrated, many years later, right? Full of regret, right? He is narrating and in his regret he reaches an understanding of those things that his wife understood and that he did not understand at the time, that is, After her death, he goes through a kind of metanoia when the woman’s suicide has an impact on him and he realizes that he’s the mistake of his life, right? So he somehow absorbs the concerns that were hers, right? What do you mean? In both cases, you have the relationship between the Brazilian Middle Bourgeois and Petit Bourgeois with the intellectual, in this case, the two novels are written in the first person, but São Bernardo is written by the person of the bourgeois and the anguish by the person of the intellectual, then in inverse positions, but if you analyze the more I analyze this, the more I see that the same story is told in two ways, one that culminates in suicide, the other culminates in homicide, right? So see that because it ends in death, see that this The subject is not a joke, of course there were also, let’s say, several less dramatic treatments of the subject, not in Lima Barreto itself, also in Lima Barreto, the theme of Lion Barreto’s main books, which are memories of the scribe Isaías walks ah Sad End of Policarpo Quaresma and the life and death of MJ gonzagas de so theme theme is also the same seen from three different perspectives, right? First, it is the story of a boy who comes from the countryside with the idea of ​​making a literary career in Rio de Janeiro and becoming a writer and he follows the only natural path that existed for a person In his conditions at the time it would be journalism, right and in journalism he finds, let’s say, an environment as petty as a box as devoid of any of the remotest signs of anything spiritual that he ends up failing in his career, that is to say, at least it doesn’t end in homicide or suicide, but it ends in failure, right, then in the second novel the hero is a, an intellectual, a man of studies, the novel begins with Ricardo Quaresma, who is a civil servant coming home at the end of the day and the old ladies from the neighborhood looking out the window seeing a lot of books in his room they asked But why does he have so many books if he doesn’t even have a Bachelor’s degree ? poli carar is the guy who studied a lot, his area of ​​interest is everything when it comes to Brazil he has love for Brazil everything he likes everything about the geography of the history of Brazil etc etc and he is in the condition let’s say Total isolation that he lives in relation to the society that surrounds him isolation which is not physical isolation but just mental isolation he ends up going crazy Okay, so Policarpo is already crazy from the first moment and his madness is called patriotism, right? He is so so so so so patriotic that he runs a campaign to change the national language from Portuguese to Tupi Guarani That’s right he wants to change the national symbol to become more national and so on he wants to reform Brazil in the light of his nationalism, right And in the end the thing ends with the death sentence of poic quarela, that is to say , he first becomes a national hero and then becomes a renegade. it’s the life and death of MJ gonzag s it’s a series of conversations the book has practically no plot it’s a constructed thing but it has a more poetic structure than eh eh novelistic it’s the series of conversations that a young journalist has with a an old scholar who lives isolated and as he gets to know the old man he sees that the old man doesn’t know the old man knows a lot of things who is an exceptional creature but is totally unknown, totally isolated from the society that the old man found to be a way let’s say one found a way to live, right? He lives in hiding as if he were a criminal, right? He isolated himself from society and he lives there among his books, right ? in total solitude, considering looking at Brazilian madness from afar and not allowing oneself to be contaminated by it, the theme here is also the same, that is to say, it is the Brazilian intellectual, intellectual artist, writer in Face of Brazilian society, the recurrence of this theme in National literature shows that it is good there is a problem the Writers realized this so clearly because either they are seeing things or there is some sign of reality dig [Music] [Music] oh Allah